Phenomenal Conservatism vs Words That Sound Like They Go Together: More Reflections on Competitive Debate

Word games are not the same as deep reflection on what truly seems probable; also an explanation of why debate is so insanely far left; also some more tales from my insane high school debate career

1 Reflections of seemings vs sounding correct

My friend Parrhesia has an article called Playing Word Games With the Woke. In it, he describes one of the ways that woke arguments end up seeming compelling to people. Specifically, woke people will hyper-fixate on which words are used. Thus, they’ll try very hard to — rather than establish that something is bad — establish that it’s eugenics, and then take it for granted that eugenics is bad.

To illustrate this sort of semantic ethical reasoning, imagine an ethical vegan who refuses to buy her child a stuffed animal. She argues that: a stuffed animal is an animal; it is wrong to purchase animals; therefore, it is wrong to buy a stuffed animal. If you think in words, then it makes sense. But if you start thinking about reality, you’ll notice an issue. Ethical vegans are usually vegan because they don’t want to cause animal suffering, and a stuffed animal—if you wish to call it an animal or not—does not experience suffering. Whether a stuffed animal is an animal is tangential to the ethicality of purchasing it.

Consider a more realistic example; selecting embryos for health is often called eugenics. Proponents of this practice sometimes retort with the reductio ad absurdum that choosing an attractive mate is also eugenics since attractiveness indicates favorable genes. What if the opponent concedes that it’s also eugenics and therefore immoral? That’s thinking in words again. Selecting an attractive spouse is clearly okay, and coercive eugenic practices like ethnic cleansing are clearly wrong. Both of these facts are true regardless of how a particular word is defined in English. The tendency would be to want to insist that selecting an attractive mate isn’t eugenics, but that’s tangential to the question of its ethicality.

The general form of the argument is: [Category] is wrong; [action] is a member of [category]; therefore, [action] is wrong. But the reason that the category is wrong is something that the action lacks, and deciding to include action in the category calls into question the premise that the category is wrong. To resolve this, you can try to have a debate about whether stuffed animals are really animals, or you can disregard the semantic debate and try to get to the heart of the issue. I think trying to reason with categories results in fuzzy thinking ethically. It is easy to find exceptions to general laws of morality.

This is quite common in political debates. If you can establish that taxation is theft, you don’t need to establish that it possesses the objectionable features of theft — it’s just assumed that theft shouldn’t be done.

In defending this, someone might say something like the following: look, it’s very intuitive that eugenics is bad. The entire point in dispute is whether it’s eugenics. There are going to be lots of complicated disputes about embryo selection, but the most obvious thing about it is going to be that eugenics is bad, so if it is eugenics, embryo selection is bad. After all, we should believe more obvious truths rather than less obvious truths, and the badness of eugenics is a more obvious truth.

I think this line of reasoning is really wrong.

Now, it’s not wrong in that it says we should believe the more obvious principle. If there was truly a very obvious principle that said that eugenics was always bad — even under the expanded definition that includes embryo selection — then probably we should reject embryo selection. But this isn’t intuitively obvious at all.

If we carefully reflect on the expanded idea of eugenics, it’s very obvious that some instantiations of it are bad — e.g. forced sterilization of people with low IQs or mass murder of the disabled. Thus, if we rely on intuitions we’ll include that those things are really bad. But it’s not at all unintuitive that eugenics is always bad if eugenics includes embryo selection. At this point, eugenics just means a hodgepodge of things with similarish motivation, but it’s not at all intuitive that, when we reflect, all of those are bad.

If we just reflect on embryo selection, it’s not at all intuitive that it’s objectionable. After all, it involves creating future beings that will be better off — rather than beings that have a lower IQ, greater risk of disease, etc, we can make beings that have higher IQs, lower rates of disease, and more. This seems good — one’s life will generally be improved by being smarter, and the world is improved by more smart people. And, unlike the other intuitively bad forms of eugenics, it doesn’t involve any coercion — it just allows parents to do what they want.

Now, maybe there are some objections to it — I won’t go into too much detail here about them. But certainly, it doesn’t on its face seem obviously bad. So, if it is part of eugenics, then eugenics isn’t obviously always bad. Calling something eugenics then is insufficient to prove that we shouldn’t do it.

There are some cases where describing something as a particular word will be a good reason to avoid doing it. For example, the fact that something is genocide is a pretty good reason not to do it. But this is because what’s objectionable about genocide is quintessentially the thing that’s part of the definition. Genocide is bad because it causes enormous amounts of pain, suffering, and lost well-being — something can’t be genocide and avoid killing lots of people. But this isn’t true for eugenics — if we reflect on what makes eugenics bad, it seems like it’s the forced sterilization and violent coercion that was bad. Thus, the general objection to eugenics doesn’t apply to embryo selection.

I’m a phenomenal conservative or something like it. This means I think that, if something seems a particular way, all else equal, I should assume it is that way. Thus, because it seems that, for example, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, I should believe that it is, in fact, the shortest distance. These seemings are not infallible, but they are some evidence.

Lots of people will object to phenomenal conservatism based on it merely being about things sounding right. For example, they’ll say that, when it seems to me thinking that it’s wrong to torture infants for fun and would be so even if everyone approved of it — a position I’ve used to argue for moral realism here — I’m really just picking up on the fact that it sounds true. There’s no deeper sense in which it is intuitive — it’s just the type of thing that sounds right.

This objection is totally wrong. Lots of things sound false but are true. Here’s one example — there are an infinite number of possible scenarios in which you should torture infants. That sounds wrong, but I think it’s ultimately intuitive. If the only way to prevent a billion infants from being tortured was to torture one infant, you should torture one infant; same thing for a billion plus one, and a billion plus 2, and a billion plus three, all the way up to infinity.

The difference between what this objection claims is going on and what is actually going on is the same as the difference between the intuition that embryo selection is wrong because it’s eugenics and the intuition that forced sterilization is bad. If we really reflect, it doesn’t seem like embryo selection is bad — and this is true even if, for convenient linguistic purposes, we decide to include it in the same category as lots of bad things. On the other hand, it is intuitive that forced sterilization is bad. And this isn’t just because of how it sounds; if we just carefully reflect on the pain and suffering and violations of basic rights brought about by forced sterilization, it’s incredibly obviously wrong.

The same is true about the principle that it’s wrong to torture infants for fun and would be so even if everyone approved of it. If we imagine a society where infants were crying out in pain, but every person with moral beliefs thought it was fine, it still wouldn’t be fine. This would be bad. It would be bad because of the torture going on, the unfathomable suffering being inflicted on the most vulnerable humans. The reason I think this is not because of how it sounds but because, when I really reflect on what would be going on, it seems obviously bad. It would be just as bad if the cultural relativists changed the definition of torture to only include things that are disapproved of by society.

2 Words games and debate

In high school and college debate, a very common strategy is to play the types of word games described in the previous section. One of the more buffoonish examples was in a debate round I was in, during my junior year. We knew that our opponents were going to read various arguments claiming, for example, that the world couldn’t get better for black people. Given this, in our opening speech, we preempted those arguments — we read evidence suggesting that the world could, in fact, get better for black people.

Then in their opening speech, they argued it was bad that we tried to preempt their arguments. This was, according to them, just like the Iraq war and other preemptive wars. Trying to preempt things is bad because it’s like preemptive war…. One noteworthy thing: this was in the finals of a tournament, and the team we were debating was one of the top 10 teams last year.

This is very obviously stupid. The reason preemptive wars are bad is that they kill people — our preemption doesn’t kill anyone, it merely results in more in-depth debates about things, where half of our opening statement isn’t irrelevant. And yet this stuff is rampant in debate.

Sigh — now I’ll tell you all the story of my last ever round of debate; probably the most infuriating round of my career. We read a case arguing for some water policy — the topic was about water policy. We were the ones tasked with arguing for the resolution. It was a case that we had not read before.

In debate, there are what are called off-case positions, which are separate, independent arguments about why you should lose. Some of them will just be disadvantages to the policy, others will argue that it’s not topical, etc. For those who doubt that my previous explanation of the debate community is accurate — I’ll just tell you what my opponents read; this is not, by any means, an isolated incident. Nonsense like this is common.

Our opponent’s first off-case position involved arguing that we should lose because I am a vicious racist and one should never vote for vicious racists. The evidence for this was as follows.

The context for this is pretty simple — I misread the original tweet and thought that it was just something that you think is morally disgusting but should be legal — I missed the accepted by society bit. As a result of this, I deleted the tweet shortly thereafter. Here’s the second bit.

This was sent to a group chat with 8 close friends of mine. One of them screenshotted it. I’ll explain the context, because I’m willing to grant that it looks bad out of context. I was asked whether I thought that, if you had two different races of people, and you could save only one of them, should you save the one with higher average well-being? I said yes, after all, the person with higher well-being will get more future benefits from their life. Just like it would be better to save the life of a person who will live 100 more years than the life of someone who will live another ten minutes, if all else is really equal, it’s better to save the lives of people with higher well-being. I stupidly phrased it as more moral worth, when this is pretty inaccurate based on what I meant — though the question I was asked implied that that was what was meant by moral worth, so I was saying that if that’s what one means by moral worth, I’d agree with that, though that’s not what most people mean. This was very dumb phrasing — if I were, for example, writing an article for the general public, I’d have phrased it differently, but I was writing in a group chat with a few friends of mine.

Thus, our opponents argued that because we were racist, even if our policy was good, we should be voted against. Judges should never vote for people if they personally assess them to be bad people. The specific phrasing of this was “This debate is more than just about the debate---it’s about protecting the individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.” Apparently my view that one should save hypothetical higher welfare people rather than lower welfare people if all else was equal, made this community unsafe and endangered individuals. This is another example of thinking in words — the reasoning was Matthew is racist, racism is dangerous, therefore Matthew is dangerous; even though, even granting that what I said was racist, it was racist in a bizarre farfetched hypothetical — certainly not dangerous to anyone in the real world.

Even the accusation of racism is an example of thinking in words; what I said — namely that different races had marginally different moral worth if by moral worth we mean exactly how good it is to save them — sounds really bad. But when we reflect on the principle, it does seem obvious that one should save people with higher welfare. There’s a reason that people would often risk their lives to make their life better — because they value their better life more than their worse life. If someone will risk death to go from A to B, then B is worth protecting over A, all else equal. Additionally, the following proof seems to show this.

1. If you could save one life that will have 2 utility units per day for 40 years or one unit per day for 80 years, you should be indifferent between the two. After all, both are equally good lives — if you compress the same amount of joy into half as many days, your life wouldn’t be worse.

2. If you could save one life that would have 1 utility unit per day for 80 years or one that would have 1 utility unit per day for 40 years, you should save the one that would have 1 utility unit per day for 80 years. After all, it would be worse to die when you’re 20 than when you’re 60, if you would otherwise live to 100.

3. Thus, by transitivity, you should save one life that will have 2 utility units per day for 40 years over one that will have 1 utility unit per day for 40 years.

Now, obviously, this is a terrible decision procedure. When making decisions about saving lives, no-one should be calculating the expected worthwhileness of the person’s life based on their skin color — among other things because it’s a very bad heuristic and would also result in very bad decisions. But things can be good even if they’re bad decision procedures. There might be cases in which killing innocent people is good, but one shouldn’t go around considering whether or not to kill innocent people.

There are a whole lot of other caveats I would have made if I were making a public statement, but I wasn’t; I was in a group chat with a few friends of mine. One of them screenshotted it, send it to someone else, and eventually, it was public.

Our opponent’s second off-case position involved arguing that we should lose because we didn’t incorporate personal experience or organic intellectualism in our justification of their case. You might wonder what organic intellectualism is — I have no idea, and no one else seems to either; people mostly just focus on the personal experience bit. Their defense of this was as follows.

(1)  Access – normative knowledge-making practices are steeped in expert vernaculars that crowd-out minority participation which’s a prerequisite to any procedural impact – analyzing water protection sans the three-tiers leads to distancing that creates apathetic spectatorship that divorces individuals from politics creating interpassive actors who invest and surrender to hegemonic structures.

(2)  Structural focus – Forces white debaters to engage with the structural advantages of their social locations in elite classroom settings to assimilate themselves as co-collaborators to minority debaters, but also allows minority debaters to confront how lived experience shapes academic knowledge

So basically, it’s important to talk about how personal experience shapes our assessment of some particular water policy because that’s necessary to avoid “normative knowledge-making practices” which are “steeped in expert vernaculars.” The irony of having dense jargon-filled explanations of why our claims are “steeped in expert vernaculars” was apparently lost on them. Also, it’s good apparently for us to talk about our personal experience because we’re white — so that other people can grill us on how our personal experience relates to our feelings about water policy. It’s not enough to just permit people to talk about their identity when discussing unrelated water policy — it should be mandated so that white people can be grilled about it.

This also goes to show just how bizarre the dense, opaque jargon is that fills debate. They can’t just explain clearly why what we do is bad; they have to invoke jargon, talking about social location, merely for confusion.

Their third off-case position was an argument that we shouldn’t read cases that we haven’t read before against Asian people.

1. Pathology - any 2AC grandstanding is a product of producing structural inequities that paint asians as unable to meet opaque demands set in this activity which

Apparently reading a new case is pathologizing — it treats Asian people as diseases. After all, I read new cases against diseases all the time…

a. either pushes them out of the activity as they're seen as losing in a falsely meritocratic game

If we read a new case against Asian people and win that will make it seem like Asians are bad, and then they’ll stop debating!!!!!!! But this only applies to Asian people — it’s only bad when people of color stop debating.

b. doesn't acknowledge the additional emotional, mental, and physical labor asians must perform to engage with white people which perfects the model minority myth and assumes that asian people must do invisible but necessary labor for deliberation while non asians gets to situate themselves as the center/norm

Also, if we read a new case, it fails to acknowledge extra emotional and mental labor that Asians must perform because… reasons, ones which were not explained.

The fourth argument was something about queerness. In debate, people will read evidence, but before they read the evidence, they’ll contain a summary of the claims in the evidence — this summary is called a tag. I’ll quote their tags — see if you think this is a good reason not to do water policy.

Queerness illuminates itself in the shadow of Darwinism demonstrating the mantra of “survival of the fittest” is not just a biological, but also social imperative. Queerness becomes the marker for society’s genocidal impulse to demonstrate that there are some populations that were born to die

Apparently, because of something about how queerness illuminates itself, we’re genocidal….

Nature is queer, but protection relies on human conceptions of “moral conduct” that posits queerness is as unnatural and immoral that throws us on the backburner in favor of heteronormative reproduction.

The topic was about water protection — apparently protecting water is bad because it relies on human conceptions that treat queerness as unnatural.

Water resource protection policy cascades as a colonial effect that cements social-Darwinism to suppress the marginalized as “dying races” or assimilate the “half-castes” into heteronormative whiteness

Huh?

Vote neg to queer ecology -- squo ethics enables biopolitical extermination and neoliberal ecocide -- the alt shits the epistemic paradigm in favor of queer social life which solves through micropolitical activism

Apparently voting for the other team would make ecology queerer, which is good or something.

The fifth off-case position had this tag.

The world of modern civilization is a perilous one, only showing the Extinction Rebellion cannot proliferate from the language of demanding, rather a desire of service from the revolution of love

Apparently claiming that a policy would reduce existential risks detracts from the love revolution — whatever the hell that means.

The sixth off-case position had tags that were in another language.

CP: Amee wudhaka worokha

“Hugura

Amgele basa nashuh kele

Ajhee thenchi juhnuh amka sangtha chee

Yea thugele matreh base

Thak kam khuri

Yea basa wudhar korya

Yea basaka Simhasanar bosoya!”

I think the idea is that they were reading our proposal but in a different language which is better because it challenges whiteness or something — they read some evidence from Tony Morrison about how demanding people adhere to a certain language is bad, when the language they identify with is different.

The seventh off-case position they read argued that thinking about the state is bad

‘Policy relevant’ research only provides a gloss for state violence---vote NEG for a better foundation for politics.

They ended up winning on the argument that I should lose for being a horrible vicious racist. This is despite not ever answering several arguments about why it’s terrible for debaters to be incentivized to dig up dirt on other debaters and find out-of-context screenshots to win rounds. The judge explained some reasons why he personally didn’t find this convincing; that was enough to make us lose in the mind of an allegedly impartial judge. They also didn’t address our defense of the screenshots — but that’s a losing battle; anything who says anything that sounds objectionable out of context is automatically someone that no judge would ever debate for, particularly one with the sensibilities of this particular judge. This judge does what Parrhesia laments; he thinks in words rather than fundamental ideas.

3 Why debate is so woke

The origin of the primary types of arguments that I’m criticizing — called K debate — is somewhat disputed. But I know that, pretty early on in these types of arguments, there were some debaters that read arguments using hip-hop, among other things, to make their points. They argued that the debate shouldn’t just focus on the specific topic, but it should focus on other things. If debaters, for example, say racist things, they should lose.

These teams started to do really well. Lots of teams just weren’t prepared for it. And many other teams sprang up employing similar arguments — arguing that we shouldn’t just argue about the topic, but the context in which the topic is discussed. When some teams start doing really well on a particular set of arguments, those arguments become widespread.

The reason why these arguments caught on was, I think, several-fold. One of the reasons was that a lot of people just ideologically agreed with them. Debate started out pretty left, just because more educated people who want to argue skew left. Debate is a pretty academic institution, and academia skews heavily left. The second was that lots of judges wanted to be non-interventionist. One of the common frustrations of most debaters is making arguments that you out-debate your opponents on — but then a judge doesn’t vote for them because they personally disagree with them. Judges didn’t want to do that — thus, they’d vote on things that aren’t related to the topic, as long as one team successfully argues that the other team should lose. It turns out that it’s pretty hard for most people to refute asinine accusations of racism — if someone says that you’re racist because you do preemption, few people realize why this is insanely stupid; thus, a lot of rounds were won on these arguments. Thus, lots of non-central fallacy employing arguments caught on. To quote Parrhesia again

Psychiatrist and rationalist blogger Scott Alexander describes a very similar fallacy he calls the non-central fallacy: “X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member.” Much of our present discourse is due to people using imprecise or misleading language to elicit emotional reactions or categorize behavior as unethical. Strong emotional and ethical connotations incentive stretching terms to their absolute limit; the currently fashionable words include groomer, gaslight, violence, and white supremacy.

This is a huge portion of kritik debate — arguing that you opponent does X and X is like Y in some respect and Y is bad, therefore X is bad and they should lose. It turns out that it’s pretty difficult to, when time crunched, respond to dozens of different claims about why what you’re doing is like genocide, the Iraq war, racism, and sexism.

I think a third reason these arguments caught on is that it’s really difficult to figure out what the hell lots of K debaters are saying. I’ll give some examples of quotes from debate rounds — see if you can figure out what’s being argued.

Here’s one round — this has all of the tags; so these will be the clearest explanations of what’s being argued — each tag will be followed by a bunch of paragraphs of confusing ramblings from some author, which can’t be read in a short period of time.

Tag 1

The Sisyphean myth is that of the essence of human suffering. In Tartarus, time is lost to him. Civilization is lost to him. Men are lost to him. But this is not the essence of his suffering, nor his punishment itself. For all eternity, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill. Each time, as he gets closer and closer to the top, his boulder rolls out from under him, and he is forced to repeat the cycle. Sisyphus’ punishment is not in the repetition of the task itself but is instead in the incompletion of the cycle of human enjoyment – the barring of the lost object of his desire.

Tag 2

“When we look soberly, however hard it is to do so at the moment, at the political situation and the threat of nuclear warfare, we observe a phenomenon that is more like a surrealist scenario, an unbearable nightmare or a psychosis, than a sane world.”

-Hanna Segal

Tag 3

They are haunted by the absent presence of the lurking shark. The interesting thing about the shark, though, is that our anxieties are mutual and dialectical. In our perception of the shark’s violent enjoyment, we artificially produce its demise. In its apprehension of the human, it produces ours.

Tag 4

Fantasies of transgression within cybersecurity lead to a form of self-fulfilling prophecy that generates lashout.

Tag 5

This is what I believe: That I am I.

That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more

than a little clearing in the forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest

into the clearing of my known self
and then go back.
That I must have the courage

to let them come and go.

Tag 6

They rely on the fantasy that we can ingest all resources into the system’s realm in order to sustain futural infrastructure development which terminally fails.

(This was actually from a friend of mine).

If you get up, argue for water policy, and your opponent responds with this, combined with dense, jargon-filled nonsense, it’s unclear how to respond. It’s not clear what’s even being argued. Given that debate is a technical point-scoring game, where if a point is conceded it’s assumed to be true, people have an incentive to make their points impossible to understand, before arguing that they should be treated as true because they’re conceded. Debate creates an incentive for obscurantist jargon. Fortunately, there’s an entire segment of academia dedicated to obscurantist jargon — and it also allows people to argue the other side should instantly lose for racism, or similar things.

This explains why the arguments began to take off. But after they take off, they became seeped into debate culture. It’s very difficult to spend lots of time thinking heavily about arguments without taking them seriously at all. Additionally, for strategic reasons, nearly all debaters read arguments like this. It’s more difficult to think that one’s own arguments are clownish.

Thus, once these arguments began to catch on, cultural pressures made them take off. Given that they were more prominent among better debaters, disliking them and thinking them idiotic were seen as things of the lower classes, of the proles. Real, sophisticated debaters recognized these as real arguments, and found increasingly controverted ways of responding to them — often in ways equally confused and jargon-filled. This is one of the reasons so many of my critics tried to discredit me by implying I was bad at debate. Criticizing obscurantist jargon is a habit of the proles, not of real, sophisticated debaters.

Additionally, once a lot of people began to read those arguments, it was seen as objectionable to criticize them too much. Lots of people don’t care that much about these arguments — and their diehard proponents care a lot about them. Thus, as Hanania suggests, cardinal preferences explain part of why debate became woke.

Additionally, these arguments are surprisingly tricky to answer. Consider the 7 arguments I provided above — the off-case positions. They’re hard to respond to with a hostile judge. They’re obviously stupid, but lots of obviously stupid things are hard to respond to, particularly when time crunched. And this was exacerbated by the obscurity of the arguments.

Once these arguments became ubiquitous, such that they were read in most rounds, this type of debate began to turn off those that didn’t like this style of debate. Those who wanted to talk about the topic moved to other topics — topics where the debates weren’t all about weird woke nonsense. Thus cemented the hegemony of the crazy woke in debate.

This is certainly part of the story. There may be other parts — ones which I may discuss in later articles. But I think this explains a lot of why wokeness took off so completely in debate.